Our theme month for October is Childhood Fears.
A small girl sits at the water’s edge, staring broodily into a sparkling blue sea. Around her is the bustle of a July beach day. Parents lead their children, clad in floaties of dubious anti-drowning efficacy, into the shallows, where these toddlers wrinkle their nose in bemusement at the first wave that sprays into their face. A group of school-age children fight over a kick board, which they will try (unsuccessfully) to use as a surfboard.
Written by, directed by, and starring yours truly, Maws (2011) takes the shark-attack subgenre of summer blockbuster to a new location: the traditionally unsalted and shark-free waters of Lake Michigan.
Theodora¹, the film’s child protagonist, is vacationing with her family by The Big Lake in an unspecified beach town that is probably Holland, Michigan. Sharklessness is foundational to the town’s marketing—a point driven home repeatedly by the slogans of t-shirts and hoodies in local souvenir shops. (Numerous scenes feature Theodora and her family looking for wearable clearance merch.)
Thus, when characters begin to go missing while engaging in water-based activities, local authorities avoid pursuing coincidences any further. (The film’s director denies any connection to previous shark movies, claiming they had not seen Steven Spielberg’s original 1975 film prior to developing the concept for Maws.)
In fact, no one in the movie—other than Theodora—even seems to consider the possibility of a shark. Any reported disappearances are chalked up to mundane, known aquatic dangers such as undertows, insufficient adult supervision, jumping off the pier, and sea-dooing under the influence, and this seems to be a relatively reasonable decision. Unlike most previous shark movies, Maws is remarkably non-gory. When a young woman goes missing after a late-night swim, no body emerges to establish habeas corpus.
Even Theodora can’t see the tell-tale triangle fin. She just senses that it’s there, for reasons that the film never explains. Although Theodora keeps looking over her shoulder, she cannot turn her head around in time to catch it.
“It’s impossible to prove an absolute negative,” the minister says, in a scene where Theodora and her family attend a vacation church of Hollywood-typical denominational and theological ambiguity.
Because of this, Theodora does not know what to do.
While in the water, Theodora avoids going deeper than a certain mark. Surely sharks can’t swim in water this shallow? Not without anyone noticing? At least not the ones big enough to do any serious damage?
However, our young heroine does not know all that much about sharks, and does not have Internet access to do any research. Thus, the marks for safety keep changing. Sometimes, it’s the knees; at others, the hips; at others, the chest; and at others, the place where the waves crash onto the sand and brush their fingers over your toes. (Could a shark jump up that far?)
The unseen shark also creates a moral crisis for Theodora: how does she keep people safe when she cannot warn them? At one point in the film, Theodora sits on the shore, safe from sharks in all but the campiest of movies. However, she wonders if it is evil for her to rest in her position of relative safety while her family, blissfully unaware of Lake Michigan sharks, enjoys the water.
Like many films of its kind, Maws is a rather silly movie. The movie’s conventionally sharkless setting combined with the lack of tangible shark presence do nothing to combat this. Nevertheless, as implausible as the premise is, it’s not absolutely impossible. Although sharks are not known to enter the Great Lakes, the bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas), which has been implicated in numerous fatal shark attacks, is capable of living in freshwater for extended periods of time. Moreover, plenty of stuff has gotten into the Great Lakes. At the state park, campground posters warn of emerald ash-borers, purple loosestrife, bighead carp, and zebra mussels. On the pier, fishermen catch round gobies by the dozen. A group of these little fish lay on the pavement, gasping for breath. “They can’t be returned to the water. They’re invasive. Got carried in by the bilges of boats,” a fisherman says.
Could a baby bull shark be introduced that way? Are bull sharks ever that small? What about terrorists? Or the kind of person responsible for the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders? Could they introduce a dangerous species to the Great Lakes as a form of biological warfare?
These are not questions you can get answers to when you are seven years old and on vacation. Maws asks them anyway, and then, frustratingly, never answers them.
¹When I was younger, I, like Anne Shirley, thought it would be cool to have a long, fancy name. My seven-year-old self came up with many such names for self-insert characters in short-lived writing projects.
After graduating from Calvin in May 2025 with a degree in writing and Spanish, G. E. Buller decided to stay in Grand Rapids. Currently, she is working as a special education aide. Her non-writing hobbies include fussing over her aquarium and reading about medieval/early modern nuns.
